The panic is picking back up steam, led by “surges” in “cases”—-which are caused by massive numbers of testing. See THE NUMBERS below.
I heard on the news (AM radio!) last night a plea to “keep away from hospitals” so that they’re clear for the “second wave” which will sooon be crashing down all around us!
Could it be the prog media organizations want to frighten people from going to the polls?
No lessons have been learned from the first wave of the panic. Not one damned one.
If you think it would help, please forward this post to anybody you know who is panicking. Point them to THE NUMBERS section.
BOOK UPDATES
Herd Immunity To COVID Is Not Reckless. It Would Protect The Vulnerable
U.S. professors say COVID-19 lockdowns ‘had little effect on the spread of the coronavirus’
The Real Debate is Between Fauci and Other Scientists, Not Fauci and Trump
YouTube censored one video, then Vimeo followed suit. Because science is best decided by bloated blue haired Big Tech censors.
NRO Episode 323: The Price of Panic by Jay Richards, William M. Briggs, and Douglas Axe.
Cross examined podcast with Frank Turek.
Tom Woods show (a video YouTube hasn’t yanked yet).
Mike Church show (ditto).
“The Price Of Panic”: Authors Condemn “Tyranny Of Experts” Who Panicked The World Over COVID
The Price of Panic website. Not us; somebody else collecting the harms down by governments and panicked citizens.
RANDOM INSANITY
Reader JC writes of a sign in the bathroom of a Catholic church: “Wash your hands and say your prayers because Jesus and germs are everywhere”.
FLU WARNING!
I quote myself: “I repeat my fear that with the ridiculous and increasing levels of testing, the regular cold and flu season—and its associated infections, hospitalizations, and deaths—will be used to juice the panic. Be watchful for this.”
It’s happening as predicted. We saw last week the WHO’s flu tracking showed the flu all but disappeared for months. Others are noticing it too.
Just like with flu, vaccines will not save us from all coronadoom deaths.
WHO data, update Monday night.
MASKS
- Mask Madness — Our Latest Moral Panic
- Take Your Masks Off: That’s What THE Science Says
- Coronavirus: Face masks could increase risk of infection, medical chief warns.
- Masks Don’t Work: a Review of Science Relevant to Covid-19 Social Policy, World’s Top Epidemiologists – Masks Don’t Work!
- Past blast: masks don’t work.
Let's take a brief journey into the success (or lack thereof) of masks in preventing the spread of coronavirus.
Come with me on a tour of the wonderful world of mask mandates and their results.
Here is a preview of our journey.
(1/16) pic.twitter.com/QKb8HUi1u9
— Yinon Weiss (@yinonw) October 27, 2020
Nature (thanks to reader Dom): Modeling COVID-19 scenarios for the United States. Abstract on Mask paper that many are touting.
We use COVID-19 case and mortality data from 1 February 2020 to 21 September 2020 and a deterministic SEIR (susceptible, exposed, infectious and recovered) compartmental framework to model possible trajectories of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). …Universal mask use could save an additional 129,574 (85,284—170,867) lives from September 22, 2020 through the end of February 2021, or an additional 95,814 (60,731–133,077) lives assuming a lesser adoption of mask wearing (85%), when compared to the reference scenario.
How many times—I’m asking you—have I told you that all models—where all means every damned one—only say what they’re told to say? This model was told to say masks work. That masks work was an assumption of the model.
They ran the model and announced “masks work”—and many believed a discovery had been made. No! It was an opinion being delivered. An opinion they started with, not discovered.
The stuff that passes for science these days resembles what comes out of a sick cow that got into the Halloween candy.
The Fabulous Fauci, flip flopping yet again, now demands national mask mandates until 2022.
Britain’s Ferguson, another serial panicker, says don’t have Christmas.
Delingpole: NHS Test and Trace Whistleblower: “It’s a Complete Shit Show.”
And what about Sweden and others that never mandated masks? Crickets ain’t in it.
NY Times bleated about a new study “showing” masks work.
Proof that masks work: Kansas counties with mask mandates have half as many Covid-19 cases as those without via @NYTimes https://t.co/PwKxMSt8sE
— NaomiOreskes (@NaomiOreskes) October 27, 2020
No. Wee p-values in a needlessly complex statistical model were used to conform a city-country comparison, using smoothed and not actual data (smoothed data makes weer Ps). Worse, our friend found this:
Wow the Kansas chart fraud was even worse than we knew. Check out the endpoint trick they used, in addition to the secondary axis. https://t.co/bFwG8u9ZvN via @SentinelKSMO pic.twitter.com/mbYp9u2HkH
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) August 13, 2020
THE NUMBERS
Sources: daily tests, CDC official toll number one, number two (the old weekly file, now suspect). All current as of Monday night.
Here are the number of daily tests:
Insane and growing insaner. I don’t know what else to say. Yes, there are a couple of missing days in the data. Medical data (as I told you from day one) is messy.
These tests lead to positives, false, minor, asymptomatic, and even real cases, which the media is falsely calling “cases”. The level of testing it responsible for the “surges” reported.
Testing levels for several select states (chosen because I heard these on the news).
Up, up, and away, in the upper reaches of the stratosphere. Ionosphere next stop.
And here are the accompanying attributed deaths. Note the changing y-axes!
We soon will talk about the asinine, even satanic, zero-tolerance policy on coronadoom deaths. If we are waiting for zero to end the panic, we will wait until the last trump.
CDC weekly attributed coronadoom deaths for the whole US:
As below, counts are up to 8 weeks late, but most in by three. We are in a casedemic, caused by testing. A panic willingly embraced by both citizens and government.
Here are the CDC official weekly all cause death counts. As always, last three weeks are dots, it takes up to eight weeks to get all counts, but most are in by three. Dashed line is all cause minus attributed coronadoom.
Put your finger on the point where you think the current crisis is. If anything, deaths are lower than where we’d expect. You know why.
The only fatality rate you should care about is population fatality rate, which is here, for the doom and for all other causes. What are you worried about? Seriously. What?
Again, if you’re buying into the panic, look at that picture and tell us why.
I get a lot of question about total dead this year, and something called “excess deaths”. Let’s first re-look at the all-cause deaths in a different way.
You can see 2020 sticks out like an angry women’s studies graduate at an NRA meeting. Clearly, more people are dying this year, at certain periods anyway. IMPORTANT: This does not mean these deaths are all coronadoom! They include the suicides, cancers, heart attacks, despair, and the many, many, many other deaths caused by your and the government’s panic.
There is a clear and steady year-on-year increase in yearly total deaths, mostly because of population growth. The black line is a simple week-by-week extrapolation of this growth. It represents a possible weekly total deaths if it weren’t for the doom and the panicked idiotic overreaction.
It is just a guess. Look far off to you? Well, we have to go by looks, because the number of deaths we would have had without doom and panic is a counterfactual. Only God Himself knows what the line should look like. But if we like it, then here is a running total of “excess” deaths, week on week:
Yes, you see it correctly. Deaths were lower than “expected” (always assuming our guess is right!) at the beginning of the year, grew to a peak of about 210,000, and then falls. But most of the fall at the end is because of the same late reports noted above. We won’t know the true counts for 2020 until the end of February.
Earlier we guessed that many of the same people the doom killed would have died later this year. If that’s so, and it doesn’t appear far wrong, then the curve will stay below that 210,000 figure, even after the late counts are in. All we can do is wait and see.
Today’s cover image by Irish Lad.
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I keep thinking that one day I am going to wake up and all of this nonsense will have been a bad dream. It’s collective insanity and it all has to do with influential people in the media and government bureaucracy being butthurt and crazy over the president. It’s just so… silly. Why are we doing this? Why are we letting government do this to us? Why aren’t the American people just laughing it off? Why are so many people so willing to let themselves be scared and bossed around by petty politicians?
Clearly, there is no perspective at all in most Americans, just narcissistic impertinence.
Anyway, to the substance of my post, in my daily Covid spreadsheet – that I keep because I don’t trust the gatekeepers, who change historical data without saying they did, and do so all the time with Covid data – I have a graph of tests against positives on the same chart and it’s clear just how much testing has been goosed up just to capture more and more positive results. The president got mocked for connecting “cases” with tests, but that’s exactly what is happening. We’re testing anyone who goes into a doctors office and offering free public tests to anyone not the street who wants one and then panicking over the “outbreak” because we found what we were looking for. It’s ridiculous. Most of these positives would never know it had they not been tested.
On the bright side, once this latest outbreak starts to subside – and it will – the vaunted “positivity” metric will start fall again and I’m not 100% sure anymore the politicians are smart enough to know to cut back on the testing to keep it artificially goosed up like they want it to be.
Briggs, thank you for this blog and your perspective. Since I found it several months ago it has helped to reinforce my skepticism, even when several friends and acquaintances tell me how “fringe” and “loony” I sound when I voice my opinions on this collective nonsense.
Here is the graph of tests vs positives:
http://solanumonlinemedia.com/images/Testing%20Chart%20102620.png
You can clearly see how in the past six weeks they’ve goosed up testing by 20% just to keep a steady number of daily “cases” flowing out to keep the public panic going. There’s no telling how much they’ve monkeyed with the sensitivity of the tests or otherwise encouraged false positives in the same vein of thinking.
We don’t test like this for any other disease. It’s ALL about politics and ALL about making the president look bad before next Tuesday. The most awesome result would be for it still not to have worked.
Did you hear? Now not wearing a mask means you are mentally ill! Off to the camps with you!
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/mask-wearing-anti-social-personality-traits-study-brazil-b1347252.html
Dr. Briggs, You are the Statistician and can apply that “science” to the issue. When do we start to take into account the way samples are being taken and the application of the statistics. In my part of Wisconsin (and I expect many other places) those taking samples ask for sxs (symptoms) before deciding to take a swab. This will skew the results of the testing. “Testing” will not define “Cases”, since they do not compare to the population at large. The next issue is the type of test being used and its “False Positive” or “False Negative” rate. My understanding is that the PCR being used may very likely have a high false positive rate but may be testing for an array of “Corona Viruses” including the Common Cold and Seasonal Flu. The suggestion that the Flu is being included in the count and that suggestion has some voracity in so far as the rate of dx (diagnosing) the Flu has dropped nearly 90%+. In my mind the numbers being listed are “Junk”!
Briggs:
Let me suggest the use of a very simple index:
(number of deaths or in hospital) / (number of “cases”)
This index can show the huge amount of unnecessary tests yhat are being made.
As the WHO spreadsheet only records deaths and cases, I compared some “developped” countries using this index. For instance, the data available on 23 October. Striking: in Mexico, 7.6 deaths per 100 cases; in the USA, 1.7; in most European Union countries, between 0.5 and 1.5.
Explanation: it seems that a few countries (among which, Mexico) only record a “case” when there is a positive test AND symptoms (disease, even mild). I was told that in Mexico test are only made on symptomatic patients. But the Euro/Canadian/US liberal madness, following the stupid “Test! Test! Test!” from the WHO boss, is diverting precious manpower from the clinical care of patients to bureaucratic tascs of following contagion chains and other demential activities with no use when an epidemic is disseminated in the general population.
An asteroid hit could give us the zero-tolerance we so crave. Start praying now the thing hits us this time right before the election. Remember, ONLY death is 100% safe.
smoothed data makes weer Ps—smoothed data is like putting the data, in this case humans, in a blender and pretending the result is in any way useful.
I learned from Covid that Wyoming is a third world state. There are 80 people hospitalized for Covid and “we’re nearly overwhelmed”. 80 people in a state with 500,000 people is “overwhelmed”? Don’t drive on I-80 or I-90 because a car pile-up could send the medical community a terrifying overwhelming numbers of patients. Just a warning.
JR: I do not believe this is about Orange Man Bad. It’s about world domination and the answer to the question “How stupid are human beings?”. Blaming it on Orange Man Bad is a cop out and following the smoke and mirrors. For one thing, if the Turnip in the Basement wins, it will only get worse, not better.
Doc, I sense your frustration. I admit that I figured all this would die out back in April, once “cooler heads prevailed.” (I was terribly, cataclysmically, mistaken.) While the lack of scientific integrity and basic data analysis skills from the people, like Fauci, who are supposed to be scientists, is troubling, something else is beginning to really chap my shorts. People are continuing to ascribe utility to virtue signaling behaviors. Things like wearing a mask–which does not work, as per many RCTs–and staying vigilant–whatever the hell that means, are now signs of “doing your part to fight the virus” and I guess, save mankind. Virtue signaling is now a virus fighting tool! Add to that the incessant “post hoc ergo propter hoc” attribution errors, and logic and rationalism are taking a beating all over the Interverse! Thanks for all you are doing.
One thing about masks that will never cease to be frustrating is the normie reaction of:
Cases going down: “This proves that masks work!”
Cases going up: “This proves that people aren’t wearing masks!”
@Sheri I went through your blog about wind energy and I want to say I feel for you. I have a background in electronics and actually understand the technical reasons why “green” energy isn’t as green.
Here’s another example. If all you care about is power, incandescent bulbs are the worst thing next to the devil. But because of its simplicity, you can recycle it easily and with high success. Unlike CFLs that contain complex electronics, or mercury. Or LEDs that contain probably dozen different components and equally as many different materials.
I was an environmentalist before it became a fad. I knew the mainstream media environmentalism was full of something sour. In the real world, everything comes with trade-offs and decisions have to be made carefully.
I’m in Canada and I see places for escape in certain states and none here. And the Faxuci-equivalents are trigger happy in doing Lockdown 2.0. So excuse me on not feeling that bad for Wyoming(though I wish you luck as well). I wish I could escape to Florida or South Dakota. Not for a vacation, but to live there.
I’m starting to be sick of hearing Sweden as the model among lockdown skeptics. There are better examples in the US states. Sweden, if you ignore the covid religion, has other issues such as being extreme progressives. Guess stepping in urine is preferable to poop.
Another note about covid. Interestingly they like to repeat the number six. Six feet. Six people indoors. Why not five, or seven? Maybe its intentional if you know what I mean? Flaunting the symbols of their god?
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@DavidCH1 — found Sheri’s blog based upon your note. Thanks!
@Sheri — love the quote from Dr. Gordon Fulks. Pertinent at a time when we hear, all over the U.S. MSM, “trust the science” as if trust was a scientific requirement!
Thank you to those who checked out my blog.
DavidCH1:
I don’t feel bad for Wyoming—they chose to be a third world loser and a wannabe. I don’t feel bad for them—mostly I despise them. The state did this to itself. South Dakota used to be really nice, and based on Covid response, may still be.
The Chinese used 3 feet for school kids and they had pool noodles taped on them to measure the distance. It’s all a political stunt, using the easiest measure someone can come up with. Zero science.
Well at least now we’ve all had a taste of the Green New Deal and are now faced
with twenty years of hard labor digging ourselves out of the hole. With thirty percent
of small businesses gone a political lobotomy at the feckless leadership level is
in order and long overdue. It will be interesting to see who emerges as the primary
amazon-esque airline carrier to soak up the debris that’s been made of the industry.
They don’t want the peasant class flying anyway. Crime rates will continue to compound
on a quarterly basis and will soar into the stratosphere once the funny money runs out
or you need a wheelbarrow to push it around in. Yet people still remain hopeful nodding
their heads in acquiescence meekly obeying one inane mandate after the next, not even
realizing the fox has left the hen house and only the middling rats remain.
–
The Climate Cult’s Brat Brigade
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/10/the-climate-cults-brat-brigade/
And if Biden-Harris win next week, we can expect never-ending fear-mongering, paranoia, and Covid mask tyranny for the foreseeable future (they and assorted other scum, like Fraudci & Gates, are already talking about the “need” to continue masks and anti-social distancing in to 2022!).
And Biden is clearly not in it for the long haul in terms of his mental capacity holding-up, so a vote for him is effectively a vote for Harris (who couldn’t even get 2% of her own party’s votes in primaries) when Biden gets Amendment 25’d 6-9 months in. An absolutely terrifying prospect.
Needle less panic!
Even South Dakota is no bastion of sanity. Yes, Noem held her ground. But that did not prevent South Dakotans from panicking and locking down. The pan-panic was pervasive and seamless. The whole world panicked. Only individuals kept their wits.
If we stopped calling “studies” science, it would help. I can make a study anything I want. It’s a farce in most cases and anti-science.
I wish you would use more than a spell checker for proofreading.
A weekend trip to the country, rural Columbia county a couple hours north of NYC. Hillsides of hardwood forest ablaze in fall color, lovely patchwork fields of corn, beans, and hay, rivers, streams, lakes and ponds, winding country lanes, and plenty of healthy fresh air. Idyllic. But for all the masked zombies. Had hoped to find a more relaxed attitude but slavish compliance was the norm — the new normal — and the people have no problem with it. Amazing.
Our Globalist Overlords chutzpahed all their chips on this scamdemic Big Lie. Desperate to defeat Trump and his American nationalist deplorables, defeat the Brexiteers and the Euro-nationalists and show the world they still have the mojo-moxie-testicola-globo-diablo WILL to DOMINATE and RULE THE ENTIRE FECKING PLANET, BITCHES! You would have thought it crazy they could take a regular cold-flu and fake a pandemic and frighten fools by the billions to make them OBEY GIANT! But you would have thought wrong. They did it! How the hell did they know they’d get away with something so outlandish? For now, anyway. The game isn’t over, yet. But I must admit they had a more accurate measure of social rot, foolishness, cowardice, and venality than many were willing to countenance. So they gambled big and made big gains, at our expense. The rat bastards.
Governor Walz announced yesterday why the virus wasn’t “under control:” not enough testing! According to him they need to up their testing efforts to a “massive” scale to keep it under control.
As a reminder, over 1 in 5 people in MN have been tested already. But this apparently does not count as “massive.”
Good video on Masks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RaBLKKXJt4
Came across this quote today from St. Anthony the Great (d. 356AD), one of the Desert Fathers, and it basically sums up our time quite nicely:
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying ‘You are mad; you are not like us’.”
I was actually out of date on testing for MN. We’re up to 30% of the population tested, with 25,000 tests per day (in a state of about 5.6 million).
How can it be even the least bit plausible that the problem is not enough testing?
They will say that we need more testing when literally each and every person has been tested (you may have gotten infected since your first test, donchaknow.)
Here’s the CDC’s page on fewer positive tests for the flu: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937a6.htm
They say that the number of flu tests is way down but also that the positivity rate is down even more. They surmise that this is because of anti-COVID measures (masks, lockdown, etc.).
What’s wrong with the CDC’s explanation?
Apparently, masks and hand-washing hardly slowdown Covid.
But they kill the flu.
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Please look into German Corona Investigative Committee dr Reiner Fullmuch on you tube. He’s been censored but continues on other sites They are in English and German